I first met Roy Ford in the canteen at Pinewood Studios when we were both working as "clapper-boys" on a film called Sink the Bismarck.

He on the first unit with all the stars – led by Kenneth More, the UK’s biggest then – and me on the model-unit, wading through the huge exterior water-tank that the studio had built especially for it. As 1959 gifted us a glorious summer, we laughed that I came out the winner. On our first meeting, I even remember what Roy was wearing that day – be aware that Pinewood then was a film factory and any kind of style among junior studio employees was frowned upon – but Roy was a rare sight in the studio, a "freelancer" and a very flamboyant one at that. He was dressed in a beautifully tailored antelope suede jacket and cavalry twill trousers. He was blond and extremely good-looking (please believe me, I’m not gay) and he had that beautiful soft-spoken cultured voice, which always reminded me of a young Lawrence Olivier – he even looked like him a little bit, too.

It would have been easy to hate Roy for having all those qualities whenever one caught sight of oneself in a mirror – but not a bit of it. For some reason Roy and I clicked on that very first day, when we were both in our early twenties, in a friendship that was going to last for forty-nine years! Whenever I’ve tried to analyze it, I can only conclude that Roy and I were uncannily similar in our views on life, our work, and the people that were in them – and we both went on to marry oriental girls. He, like me, detested pomposity and self-importance, playing it safe and keeping one’s own counsel at the expense of one’s talent. If you asked him for an opinion, you got one. If he liked you, he’d look after you. If he didn’t he wouldn’t give you the time of day.

And Roy had talent to spare. Looking at his professional record, it’s easy to pigeon-hole him on the topmost shelf. Just look at the people he worked with, who asked him to grace the camera crew on their films: directors Mel Shavelson, Sidney Furie, Mike Newell, Mike Hodges, and Roman Polanski; filmmakers of the first water. And the actors and directors – enough lords-a-leaping and knights to make a day: Sir Alec Guinness, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir David Lean, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Sean Connery, Lords Olivier and Attenborough. There were others: Widmark, Brando, Lollobrigida, Hackman, even George Lazenby. If I had to choose the greatest camera operator the British film industry ever produced, I would have to name Ernest Day, if only for the magnificent pictures to which he was able to apply his craft: Exodus, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, et al.

And when Ernie moved up to director of photography, he chose Roy to operate for him whenever he could. Likewise, Frederick Young – our only three-time academy award winner for cinematography – chose Roy, too. And when you are chosen by such masters of their craft there can be no dispute about your own talent. More to the point, whenever I had to choose an operator for a second-camera or second-unit or to fill-in for me, it would be Roy. And I was always enormously flattered when he always chose me. We both flourished through the Sixties and Seventies, the Golden Age of films – but later the industry changed course. Producers wanted to work without us. Many DoPs began taking our jobs and we camera operators found it harder and harder not only to get work on the kinds of films we were used to – the best – but any kinds of films. Thus, our day-to-day contacts with our friends became fewer and fewer; the phone calls and parties further and further apart…

I am sad to say that I hadn’t seen Roy for probably five or six years. But whenever I wrote an article in our trade magazines on some of the issues facing us in the industry, Roy never failed to call me and tell me how good it was – how funny, how sad, how telling. Anything to make me feel good and he always succeeded. More than anything I respected Roy not only as an operator, but as a treasured friend. He was, above all, an extremely private person and 3 always his own man. I remember him for his truly unique sense of humour and singular ways. If it got too quiet on set, he would affect an extraordinarily loud sneeze.

Those who didn’t know him would stare at him as if he was some kind of nut. But he simply faced them out. Once, a famous very beautiful actress was playing an extremely moving scene. Roy, standing just a few feet from her, surreptitiously wet his eyes and as the director called „cut‟, Roy, holding a handkerchief to his face, let out a little sob. The actress rushed to him, showering him in kisses and cuddles, consoling him, and Roy, as only he could, carried it off with aplomb. Another time, checking into the Athens Hilton, he found what he must have thought was a pretentious fountain and goldfish pond between himself and the check-in desk. He simply walked across it, up to his calves in water, and nonchalantly reached for a pen in front of the astonished staff.

These stories are legend. You’d be in a crowd – in a pub, at a party, an event somewhere – and Roy would stand with all of us, yakking away with anecdotes, sending up one, tearing down another. And suddenly there would be a hole in the company. Somebody would say, “Where’s Roy?” And another, mystified, would answer, “I dunno. He was here a minute ago…” And that’s how Roy took his leave, a Will-o‟-the-Wisp, never saying goodbye. But now, along with my deepest condolences to Mai-Ling, and his sons, Lance and Shaun, these words must stand for the dozens of goodbyes that Roy never allowed me to say. “Goodbye, dear old friend. A part of me goes with you and I have but one regret: I knew you well, but I wish I’d known you more.”